”While the population of Linux users is small, their impact infected a fair amount of players’ games. This ultimately brought us to our decision today.”
Fuck EA and their opinion. Even if every single Linux user were cheating I bet they wouldn't even account for a tenth of the cheater players. Lazy scumbag execs who like to scapegoat their incompetence on things they don't understand.
They can tell us whatever they like. They are financially incentivized to find a scapegoat, which takes away their credibility completely. The fact is that Respawn has had a massive cheater and hacker infestation ever since the days of Titanfall 1 and continuing with Titanfall 2 and Apex. It's been an issue for longer than Linux gaming has been a factor, and smearing it on one part of the playerbase will do fuck all to resolve the deeply seated issues with Respawn's shitty software.